M.S. in Computational Biology Students Receive Notable Internships

Within the Department of Biological Sciences’ Masters of Computational Biology program, students are encouraged to participate in a research internship during their course of study to enrich their academic experience. This summer five students in the program have obtained internships across the country.

Yaw Nti-Addae will work on three main projects at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He will conduct research on microarray analysis, assist in developing an automated system to extract and transfer information from online public databases to local databases, and convert existing bioinformatics tools to interactive web versions.

Jessica McGillen will head to Natick, Massachusetts to join The MathWorks Corporation. McGillen stated, “I will be collaborating with the computational biology team and working on the development of SimBiology and the MATLAB Bioinformatics Toolbox, which are software products for biological systems modeling and simulation, biomarker detection, gene expression analysis, sequence analysis, and pathway modeling and analysis.”

Joshua Earl will intern at the Center for Genomic Sciences, which is a part of Allegheny General Hospital. At the center, Earl plans to help design a database to house their genetic research.

Ayush Raman will work for Russell Schwartz, Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University. Within the Russell laboratory, Raman will utilize Java, while working on the Simulation Project. This project involves discrete event simulation of self-assembly kinetics.

Lastly, Donghun Lee will participate in a summer internship program with Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Lee’s research will center on kinase proteochemometrics, which is a method of approximating protein kinases' levels of activity given data on the kinase and ligand interactions. This study will also utilize machine-learning techniques.